Israeli Official Statements
The first report about the raid came from CNN. Israel initially did not comment on the incident, although Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did say that "The security services and Israeli defence forces are demonstrating unusual courage. We naturally cannot always show the public our cards." Israeli papers were banned from doing their own reporting on the airstrike. On September 16 the head of Israeli military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, told a parliamentary committee that Israel regained its "deterrent capability".
The first public acknowledgment by an Israeli official came on September 19 when opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu said that he had backed the operation and congratulated Prime Minister Olmert. Netanyahu advisor Uzi Arad later told Newsweek "I do know what happened, and when it comes out it will stun everyone."
On September 17, Prime Minister Olmert announced that he was ready to make peace with Syria "without preset conditions and without ultimatums". According to a poll done by the Dahaf Research Institute, Olmert's approval rating rose from 25% to 35% after the airstrike.
On October 2, 2007 the IDF confirmed the attack took place, following a request by Haaretz to lift censorship; however, the IDF continued to censor details of the actual strike force and its target.
Amir Oren, an Israeli journalist publishing in Haaretz opined "we can safely say that behind the successful blackout campaign lies an enormous failure" namely the failure to predict how Syria would respond to the strike: "whoever expected him to respond to the operation in a military operation was wrong".
On October 28, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Israeli cabinet that he had apologized to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan if Israel violated Turkish airspace. In a statement released to the press after the meeting he said: "In my conversation with the Turkish prime minister, I told him that if Israeli planes indeed penetrated Turkish airspace, then there was no intention thereby, either in advance or in any case, to — in any way — violate or undermine Turkish sovereignty, which we respect."
Read more about this topic: Operation Orchard
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